Joel Dinerstein

writer & professor
race, music & cool

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Coach: A Story of NY Cool

October 04, 2016

My new book drops today: it's a brand narrative of Coach in honor of the company's 75th anniversary, a coffee-table book companion to this year's Coach-1941 fashion line. As a proud city kid from Brooklyn, I enjoyed excavating the back-story of this iconic brand and I shaped the narrative by detailing NYC's decades through propulsive pop-cultural chunks. Both the brand's founder, Miles Cahn, and its current creative director, Stuart Vevers, are compelling figures of then and now. Long-time Coach fan and NY icon Debbie Harry wrote the foreword, Fabien Baron did the scrapbook layout and PAPER made its publication release official yesterday.

Joel Dinerstein is the author of three books on cool, including the first history of the concept (The Origins of Cool in Postwar America), the first major exhibit of cool icons (American Cool), and a corporate history, Coach: A Story of NY Cool. My TED Talk, entitled "Why Cool Matters," can be found on YouTube. I am also the author of the award-winning Swinging the Machine, a theory of swing-era jazz and technology, and Jazz: A Quick Immersion, a short history and listening guide.

I am a cultural historian and Professor of English at Tulane University, and hold a Ph.D in American Studies from the University of Texas @ Austin.

In 2014, I curated the exhibit American Cool at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. American Cool featured 100 cool icons and 100 photographs, and it was based on my historical research.